the font selector should not allow to pick any font but fixed ones only

Yes, I can confirm, fixed does not appear there.

Have you looked at fixed in xfontsel? All I see is a bunch of hiragana, and then some kanji. Maybe the only fixed-family font Ubuntu ships by default is Japanese?

Ok, I just checked out gedit, same bug. I suspect you havn't installed the right fonts.

If you still think this is a bug, it isn't gnome-terminal's bug. Try taking it up with fontconfig?

if you run "sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig", is the bitmap fonts option activated?

bitmap fonts option> no, it wasn't. I've turned it on, and 'fixed' does now appear in the list of available fonts. (So I suppose the original problem could be considered user error. As it happens I didn't do the original install on this machine.)

However, gnome-terminal still doesn't seem to be handling it correctly. This is a bitmap font, so it should only be offered at the "right" size (which happens to be 10 for 'fixed'), whereas gnome-terminal still allows you to set a size (and presumably scales the font) and gives no indication of what the natural size of the font is. Compare emacs, which gets this right -- the shift-right-click font menu just offers 'fixed' rather than any scaling options.

I know that the fontconfig stuff is because it's really aimed at fully scalable truetype fonts for applications which want to display usually proportional text at the user's choice of font and size. But gnome-terminal isn't really that kind of application -- it's a terminal, and it needs a fixed-width font -- so using a standard font setup and font selection dialog is arguably the wrong thing. For example, the dialog lets you pick a non-fixed-width font (try 'Free Sans medium 10' and watch the display get messed up whenever there's an "m") -- it should probably not display proportional fonts at all (or if it must, behind some kind of 'experts only' checkbox). So I suppose that's really what I'm complaining about -- gnome-terminal is trying to use a generic font selection system which is relatively poorly suited to a program displaying straightforward fixed-width text (so it lets you select totally unsuitable fonts and doesn't necessarily display fonts which are ideal for the terminal but which might be disabled in the system wide config because they don't make sense in the general case.)

Reopening since this bug was originally closed for the wrong reason (I think you'd have to try quite hard to manage an X server without the 'fixed' font) and there are still outstanding issues here.

Rewritting the font selector widget is not something we are likely to do any time soon according to the number of Ubuntu desktop bugs and the number of people working on it. Marking the feature request as rejected for Ubuntu, feel free to bring it upstream if you want

In my opinion forwarding upstream problems upstream is one of the jobs of the distribution maintainer. Also I don't think that "rejected" is the right category for "good idea if we had the time" -- it should be "enhancement" or "priority dogwash" or some other thing that says "yes this is a bug but not one we can or should fix immediately" Or for that matter you could have a way to say "forwarded upstream". But "rejected" is definitely the wrong thing because it means "this is not a bug".

Having said all that I don't care enough about this issue to do anything more so I guess it dies here.

as written previously "Marking the feature request as rejected for Ubuntu". I consider forwarding feature request as a part of maintainers jobs too, but we have hundreds of desktop bugs backlog at the moment and very few people working on them, which means we have to take decisions. We can set the bug as confirmed and it'll probably still be like that in weeks with no new comment, the issue is that is that it makes harder to work on the list of bugs since it's in the middle of things that have a higher priority. Anyway, setting it as confirmed if you prefer, maybe in some weeks we will catch up enough to forward wishlists too

This issue does not appear on my Hardy Heron (8.04) Beta. So marking this issue as resolved makes the list shorter ;-)

You can enable even more non TrueType fonts with:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config
sudo fc-cache -fv

You are now able to select "Terminal","Clean" etc. fonts in the fonts menu.

Correction to my last post: the mentioned commands are REQUIRED to enable bitmap fonts.
So the problem is not directly resolved in Hardy. There is a WORKAROUND.